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Popular wisdom amongst theoretical physicists says that the continuum structure of spacetime is probably not elementary, but rather emergent. While many arguments to support that view arise from speculative ideas, the argument can also be…
We strengthen the case that the new logical perspective afforded by topos theory is suitable to the task of describing the physical world around us. In exploring some of the aspects of construction of a simple quantum-mechanical system in a…
Over the last decades, observations with increasing quality have revolutionized our understanding of the general properties of the Universe. Questions posed for millenia by mankind about the origin, evolution and structure of the cosmos…
The basic equations describing a Newtonian universe with uniform pressure are reexamined. We argue that in the semi-classical formulation adopted in the literature the continuity equation has a misleading pressure gradient term. When this…
The standard model of cosmology assumes that the Universe can be described to hover around a homogeneous-isotropic solution of Einstein's general theory of relativity. This description needs (sometimes hidden) hypotheses that restrict the…
Scholars of the history and philosophy of science have asked what would decolonized science would look like. This paper develops an answer by interrogating the assumption that observations need to be recorded and communicated using the…
Most scientists would hold that science has not established that the cosmos is physically comprehensible - i.e. such that there is some as-yet undiscovered true physical theory of everything that is unified. This is an empirically…
We discuss a number of fundamental aspects of modern cosmological concepts, from the phenomenological, observational, theoretical and epistemic points of view. We argue that the modern cosmology, despite a great advent, in particular in the…
The assumption of a flat Universe that follows the cosmological principle, i.e., that the universe is statistically homogeneous and isotropic at large scales, comprises one of the core foundations of the standard cosmological model --…
The expansion of the Universe is the basis of modern cosmology. This chapter outlines the theory behind the expansion of the universe, including the cosmological principle, distances, velocities, and accelerations. We provide basic…
It is argued that quantum mechanics follows naturally from the assumptions that there are no fundamental causal laws but only probabilities for physical processes that are constrained by symmetries, and reality is relational in the sense…
Statistical description of the Universe as non-equilibrium system has been proposed. Based on two fundamental principles, i.e., the law of increasing entropy and the principle of minimum energy of the system and try to answer the question…
Cosmology as an exact physical science is of new date, but it has long roots in the past. This essay is concerned with four important themes in the history of cosmological thought which, if taken together, offer a fairly comprehensive…
Gravitation is described in the context of a dilatonic theory that is conformally related to general relativity. All dimensionless ratios of fundamental dimensional quantities, e.g. particle masses and the Planck mass, as well as the…
A critical examination is made of two simple implementations of the idea that cosmology can be viewed as a renormalization group flow. Both implementations are shown to fail when applied to a massless, minimally coupled scalar with a…
The standard LambdaCDM cosmology passes demanding tests that establish it as a good approximation to reality. It is incomplete, with open questions and anomalies, but the same is true of all our physical theories. The anomalies in the…
Contrary to classical physics, which was strongly objective i.e. could be interpreted as a description of mind-independent reality, standard quantum mechanics (SQM) is only weakly objective, that is to say, its statements, though…
In models where the constants of Nature can take more than one set of values, the cosmological wave function $\psi$ describes an ensemble of universes with different values of the constants. The probability distribution for the constants…
We introduce the notion of the cosmic numbers of a cosmological model, and discuss how they can be used to naturally classify models according to their ability to solve some of the problems of the standard cosmological model.
While purely philosophical in the early times, and still very speculative at the beginning of the twentieth century, Cosmology has gradually entered into the realm of experimental science over the past eighty years. It has raised some…